French anti-piracy agency Hadopi only sued 14 people in 20 months

The anti-P2P authority sent out over 1.1 million warning letters, though.

In 2010, French authorities instated a group of bureaucrats whose purpose was to enforce copyright protection on the Internet in France. The group, called Hadopi, was in charge of enforcing the law of the same name, which would take requests from rights holders for take downs when someone with a French IP address tried to download a P2P file containing illegally procured media.

On Wednesday, the President of the Commission for Rights Protection (part of the Hadopi agency), Mireille Imbert-Quaretta, released some numbers reflecting the efficacy of France's crackdown on piracy, and talked to the press about what she considers a successful almost-two-years.

Of 3 million IP addresses "identified" by Hadopi, 1.15 million were found to be pirating content and sent a warning letter (the first phase). Of those 1.15 million, 102,854 were given a second warning, and of those, 340 received a third strike. If the third strike is ignored, Hadopi can take legal action, and as of July 1, only 14 offenders have had a case filed with a French court as a result of Hadopi, and none have yet been to trial.

Imbert-Quaretta said on Wednesday that the numbers reflect success on the part of the agency. French blog Numerama wrote that she considered the law not as a way of punishing the user at any price but as a way of "making users understand that copyright is a constitutionally guaranteed right" and Hadopi merely wants to "change the behavior of users."

The number of users that follow-up with Hadopi when they've been sent a warning letter also suggests that the system works—if the goal is only to educate users about copyright. Six percent of people who received an initial letter from Hadopi contacted the agency for more information or to discuss their case, but that number rises to 24 percent after the second contact is made, and increases to 75 percent for third-time offenders. If someone is convicted of illegal downloading of copyrighted materials they can face a fine of up to 300,000 Euros (about $378,000) and 3 years in prison.

Still, the numbers don't have everyone convinced. France's new president has said he'd like to replace Hadopi with "something else" and upon taking office President Hollande appointed a new French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, who seemed to suggest that she'd push to shut the anti-piracy agency down. "In financial terms, [spending] €12 million euros ($14.86 million) and 60 agents—that’s expensive [just] to send a million e-mails," Filippetti said in August.